Apple's classic Pascal poster, remade as a vector image [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Apple's classic Pascal poster, remade as a vector image [pdf]

danamania.com

259 pointsalexzeitler52 comments

Some background on the poster

https://vintagecomputer.ca/the-history-of-apples-pascal-synt...

The comments on this article are even more interesting. The product manager for Apple Pascal has a copy of the poster signed by Niklaus Wirth.

Taylor Pohlman wrote the following there:

> BTW, a final comment. I sent several posters with John Couch (VP Software at the time), when he went to Europe in 1980 to help launch the Apple ///.

My dad used to work at Apple in The Netherlands in the 80s and one day he brought home this poster. I still have it and it is hanging on the wall in my home office 45 years later.

There is also another link between Apple and the artist:

The Apple bite logo was designed by Rob Janoff at Regis McKenna's firm. McKenna says the out-of-order rainbow was inspired by the work of Bay Area commercial illustrator Tom Kamifuji.

I hadn't heard this connection to Tom Kamifuji before, but knew of it being Regis McKenna's work. Here's an example of that exact rainbow I found after a quick search: https://www.flickr.com/photos/30559980@N07/37428150582

>He got two of them autographed by Nicholas Wirth himself

The first comment on that article is pure historical gold - it would be great to get Niklaus Wirth's signature added to this too, if Taylor Pohlman could be convinced to supply a scan?

> Since Jobs did not understand Raskin’s color scheme, he had an artist alter the work, unfortunately, for the worst. Left side, rigid coloring. Right side, chaos.

Interesting to see another datapoint on how an awful asshole of a boss Jobs was.

If we're looking for evidence of what an irascible asshole Jobs was, I'd rather quite the next paragraph:

"Jobs then ordered Raskin’s name removed as the creator of the work and placed the artist’s name in its place."

Without reading the comments on the article, there are multiple possible reasons for removing Raskin’s name. The article comments make clear that Raskin didn’t want his name removed. The other possibility was that he did want that, for example because the artist made it less functional. And then he might have asked Jobs to remove his name, and Jobs complied.

A person has the right to take their name off a work if that person doesn’t like how the collaboration affects the work.

The article makes it clear that Raskin wanted to be credited.

Wow.

From this new vector format it should be simpler now to restore the original colors envisioned by Jef Raskin

https://web.archive.org/web/20240104203434/http://www.danama...

The pascal system on Apple II was very advanced. I never used it (BASIC and 6502 assembly for me) but I know that one game I played, the well-regarded "Wizardry" (note the state-of-the art 3D graphics here https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Wizardr... and here https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/w/wizardry-p...)

I believe a group has built source for Wizardry from the binary and you can compile/run it today on Apple emulators: https://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/proving-grounds-v3/

it's crazy how that game, with its simple 3D graphics, led me to be fascinated with rendering 3D which ended up being a significant part of my career.

Dana’s tweets / posts are fantastic. Worth checking out the back catalogue

Site is hugged to death - do you have the Twitter handle?

She is no longer on twitter, she's @nanoraptor on masto -- sorry can't give you the whole handle as masto seems to make it rather difficult to list one's own list of following!

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social

Digging around

- http://www.danamania.com/605/

leads to

- https://quadra605.mcdonnelltech.com

Such nostalgia!

My first family computer was a Quadra 610 pizza box. Absolute dog.

Was this converted by hand or by using some vectorizer? Really impressive!

Anyway, are there any ML-powered vectorizers out there?

Essentially all by hand. I'd tried to do it a few times before with different quality scans, and while I could see the original intent on all of them, auto-tracing never held up across the whole poster.

I ended up taking a few days zoning out and re-drawing it as a white/black raster image over a highly scaled up scan, then auto-traced that in Illustrator and coloured it there. Text went in as some variant of Century Gothic with a few changes to match the original.

Do you provide the vectorized version?

It could be used to restore the original colors [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38876295

I opened the file (PDF) in Affinity Designer (a commercial vector app) and the paths are all there. I can at that point easily export as SVG.

Great work!

I think vector magic is the current state of the art: https://vectormagic.com/?=20

No one seems to have tried to leverage deep learning yet; either because they haven't thought of doing so, or it just wouldn't be worthwhile. image to SVG's are an inherently deterministic task, with not much room for the noisy error of most deep learning models like stable diffusion and such. I think algorithmic approaches are just better in this case - deep learning isn't always superior.

Raster2vector is a researched area, going well back; most notable recent work would be StarVector https://browse.arxiv.org/html/2312.11556v1

Parts of this definitely appear to have been traced, although I'm not sure if it was done manually or by a vectorizer.

Around the `OF` in the `FIELD LIST` flow, the green edge has the same perspective change as in the original, cf: https://www.attentionspan.nl/posts/technology/apple-pascal-s...

Lots of other little peculiarities of the original seem to be preserved. So it definitely wasn't re-made solely from reference.

5 years ago... someone tried abusing a text generating RNN to produce broken SVG, and then tidy it up. Genuinely curious as to how this might work with today's transformers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/cnip4m/p_a...

https://github.com/artBoffin/GAN-XML-Fixer

I had some good results with https://vectorizer.ai/

There's the Railroad Diagram Generator:

https://github.com/GuntherRademacher/rr

I remember this poster -- this was a tie in to Apple Pascal on the Apple ][ (a port of the UCSD Pascal system)

Oh yes—I remember it too.

I also remember using UCSD Pascal on a 64K Apple ][ with dual 5¼ floppy drives.

I had to use four floppy drives on a project I did - the UCSD editor had to be set up to swap parts of itself to those extra floppy disks, or there was not enough room for the code. I don't remember all the details anymore, but it was tight.

As for the poster - I remember that I saw it, but I just can't recall where, or where it came from (but I probably saw it somewhere near where I worked. So long ago..)

I wonder what the train-track diagram for C++ would look like...

I'd imagine it would be a dozen pages, thereabouts. The BNF for C++ isn't as large as many people seem to think.

https://alx71hub.github.io/hcb/

Though, of course, that's far from the only thing you need to recognise a syntactically valid C++ program.

Deciding on syntax is Turing complete in C++. (Even in Pascal, you still need to check that you only used identifiers you declared before. That's not expressed in this diagram. But the extra rules required to get to the full language's syntax are fairly tame compared to C++.)

Syntax is Turing complete, and hence undecidable, in C++, because what's valid syntax depends on types in some instances, and the type system is Turing complete.

See eg https://medium.com/@mujjingun_23509/full-proof-that-c-gramma... or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/794015/what-do-people-me...

IIRC because of some newer constexpr features you need a C++ VM with UB detection to parse C++, pretty wild. One of the reasons you have the choice between clang based source analysis tooling and incorrect tooling.

It's not so much that clang is correct: there's no way to implement correct C++ according to the standard. But if you are using clang as your compiler, at least your tooling will agree with your compiler.

I love me a good drop shadow but…hot diggity did late 80’s design pour on the honey there.

80s graphic design was wild (neon, random geometric shapes, air brush effect, grid lines)

Wonder if it will make a comeback.

This was the 1970s, baby. We had Supergraphics!

https://clickamericana.com/topics/home-garden/supergraphics-...

Wowwwwww. (This comment made my day, thank you)

I remember my elementary school gym had these! (in blues and whites)

My parents and I painted one in my bedroom. It was pretty cool, for the time. There was a kit that showed you how to trace one out and paint it.

http://blog.iso50.com/271/supergraphic/

It's made a huge comeback in synthwave and retro future music.

And fashion regarding sports clothing as typical streeware, used in all occasions.

To anyone young enough not to have any idea of what I mean, track down some Jane Fonda workout videos, or breakdance themed movies from the 1980's.

Considering the source, is this a real poster, or…?

It's real. But yeah, I understand why you're asking.

Is there anything similar for python and pytorch?

For Python's syntax: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html

If you want examples of code → ast, googling for [python ast visualizer] turns up a few tools

This is absolutely gorgeous!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com